


Bullet + Butterfly Wings

by NicoleAnell



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-21
Updated: 2012-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-02 08:04:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoleAnell/pseuds/NicoleAnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 'turning tables' challenge at bsg_epics.  Prompt: Gina lives after season two, stabilized with help from memories from other Sixes, and ends up on New Caprica.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bullet + Butterfly Wings

On this side of the glass, she remembers what it was to have authority. She reminds herself that she's in a position to give commands -- to her brother Cylons (who she could never fear), to the black-masked humans smoking cigarettes in the halls (she'd feel safer with them in the cells, every one, but she's summoned her strength to shout at them enough times that they know to lower their heads or make themselves scarce when any Six vaguely matching her appearance comes by), and most of all to the prisoners. She can command anything from them. This reversal of control overwhelms her sometimes. Just to think about it, really process it, makes her tremble.  
  
She doesn't _have_ to be Gina anymore (the phrase they use is _have to_ ) and outside these walls she's mostly stable, even happy sometimes. But Gina's thoughts are so much more intrusive than any of her sisters', and inside the detention center she feels an irrational energy coursing underneath her skin. She invites it in. Gina wants to see their blood and broken, useless limbs. She wants to see them _hurt_ , whatever they've done. Not downloaded memories of some long-ago, passively inflicted pain, committed by some sheltered copy of herself who never understood the meaning of it. She imagines finding someone specific in one of these rooms, someone who remembers what she was before, and making them hurt.  
  
It's not that simple, of course. Even when she's just watching, just overhearing from outside the rooms, their screams are knives twisting inside her. They can't help triggering memories of her own screams, and she breathes, breathes, and hates them even more as a reflection of how she must have looked to them once: helpless and straining like an insect beating against glass. It's only minutes before the novelty of revenge wears off and it seems like they're the ones torturing her again. She instinctively looks away from the defiant ones, the hatred in their eyes upsetting her even now.  
  
But the less defiant ones are almost mocking, too. Her eyes catch for a long time on a stripped, dark-haired human woman keening and sobbing in one room, and the Two has nothing more than a hand on her back. Gina was so much stronger than that, quiet and removed to the last second she could endure it, she almost resents the human's overreaction to such a passionless threat.  
  
She hesitates -- what she's doing doesn't seem quite like normal behavior, and they will worry again about her -- but she knocks eventually on the window, walks inside to confer with him. "She's not talking," Gina observes, which means she was stronger than she seemed, or ignorant - useless either way. "Was she military?" Speaking about her in past-tense already, like the dead.  
  
"Yes," he says. She tries for a moment to recognize her, to place her as Pegasus or not, but decides the answer doesn't matter.  
  
"Kill her." She can't bring herself to say something even as vague as _when this is finished_ , so the words hang in the air, final and immediate. She doesn't watch the rest.  
  
The next one goes even quicker -- she's found her calling now. The man is young, a confessed bomb-maker, survived with his father who's in some other cell. He's bleeding through his shirt and has nothing else to tell them, and she accepts his exhausted lies with an understanding nod. "Kill this one," she says to a borrowed Centurion. "Do it." The man puts his back up defensively and then goes slack and pleads, his face pressed to the floor, like he doesn't know she's doing him a favor. The bullet is quick and merciful, violently cathartic at the same time. She could feel satisfied in this. And just a little, the pieces inside her who don't _have to_ be Gina but will always be numb or screaming inside a room like this, she could feel envy.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Existence is Circular](https://archiveofourown.org/works/786444) by [deborah_judge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge)




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